by Raven Steele
One by one, partnerships were formed. Arrow ended up with Grant, and Maisy with some other boy I didn’t know. I was surprised Maisy and Hudson hadn’t paired up. I was even more surprised when Hudson stood and crossed the room to me, his eyes so blue, they practically glowed. I quickly gathered my feet beneath me to meet him.
He stuffed his hands into his pockets and shifted his weight, that layer of confidence I always saw on him gone. He looked like he was waiting in a line to get his tooth ripped out. Was I that hard to be around?
“Looks like we’re the last ones,” he said.
“I know why I wasn’t chosen, but why you?”
He rocked back on his heels and held up his hands, smiling. “Too cold. No one wants me to accidentally touch them. Not without gloves anyway, which I don’t have with me today.”
My lips parted in shock. Hudson was the most gorgeous guy I’d ever met. I couldn’t imagine any girl not wanting him to touch them, cold or not.
“Okay class,” Coach Tom said. “Spread out among the mats, but stay close enough to your partner to touch. To access the power we’re looking for, it will take two of you.”
Flames leapt within me as Hudson and I chose a mat. They ignited my stomach not with butterflies, but with fiery bats that flittered and flapped in dark excitement. I sucked in a breath, the anticipation to touch him making me dizzy.
“I’d get my gloves,” Hudson said, his smooth voice curling around me, “but you didn’t seem to mind my touch when we first met.”
It took me a few beats of my heart to speak. “I run hot, so it won’t bother me.”
“Yes, very hot.”
My legs grew weak. Did he mean what it sounded like? Could Hudson actually like me? I snuck a peek at him. His gaze still burned into mine, making my cheeks flush.
“Take hold of your partner’s hands,” Coach Tom ordered. “Then between you both, I want you to choose one of the earth’s elements to conjure, one related to either your or your partner’s gift.”
A hand shot into the air from a girl next to us.
“Yes, Amber,” Coach Tom asked.
“I can only scream really loud and my partner can stretch. What element do we summon?”
Pockets of laughter bubbled around the room.
Coach Tom scratched at his head. “How about earth since our bodies come from it?”
The girl nodded and held out her palms to her partner. I looked down at my own hands. Like Hudson, I didn’t like to touch others for fear of hurting them. Sometimes, when my pulse was steady and my mind was clear, I would risk touching others but right now, with Hudson so close, my flesh felt combustible. I could easily burn him no matter how cold he was.
He held out his hands to me. “What element do you want to focus on? Fire or water?”
Because my temperature felt off the charts, I blurted, “Water.”
“That’s probably a good idea, seeing how I’m able to control my gift.” Unlike when Maisy had said it, his words didn’t feel like cruel. He simply spoke truth.
I hesitantly lifted my hands towards his. “I don’t want to burn you.”
He smiled kindly and slid his hands over mine. “You won’t.”
The moment his skin touched mine a tidal wave of power rushed through me and straight into my bones, making me suck in a breath. It burned just as fiercely as my own flames, but differently. Cold fire. It licked at my skin, cooled the spaces between my vital organs, chilled my bones, but all in a pleasurable way that made my nerve endings stand to attention. Beneath my fingertips, his pulse thundered at the wrist.
I glanced up at him to see if he was feeling the same intense reaction. His eyes looked as wide as mine felt, and his mouth had fallen open.
Coach Tom began speaking again, but I barely heard his words over my mind trying to make sense of what was happening.
The magic of fire and ice welding together continued to weave its way through my body. His ice. I could feel it. Feel him inside me, spreading like a massive polar ice cap across a sea of hot lava. It sizzled and steamed and cracked, releasing fevered energy that made me want to pull him to me. To feel all of him against me. Flesh against flesh.
What was he doing to me? I dropped his hands. Was he doing it on purpose?
“What just happened?” he breathed as if the experience had left him exhausted.
I searched his eyes. The blue in them appeared darker like a storm rising over the ocean. Sweat dotted his brow. He reached up and swiped his fingers across his forehead. He lowered it, staring at the moisture in awe. “I’ve never sweated before.”
I didn’t say it out loud, but this was the first time in my life I didn’t feel like I had a fever.
Maisy appeared in front of us. “Let me save you, Hudson.” She dangled a pair of gloves in front of him. “I found a pair in Coach Tom’s office. Rose, you can pare up with Chris, but please don’t fry him. He’s a good friend of the family.”
She lightly nudged me out of the way. Hudson was still staring in shock at the sweat on his fingers, his face pale, too distracted to notice the switch.
“Over here!” a voice called.
I glanced across the room where Maisy’s partner stood motioning me over. That must be Chris.
“See you around,” I said awkwardly to Hudson. I might’ve stood my ground with Maisy, but after what just happened with Hudson, I didn’t think we should touch again.
His head jerked up, and he looked from me to Maisy, frowning. “Wait, what?”
Maisy slapped his shoulder with the gloves. “You’re my partner now.”
I turned my back and walked away towards Chris. Hudson’s cold fire slowly receded within me. I wished it wouldn’t. The feeling of being cool when I’d been burning my whole life was something I didn’t want to give up.
When I reached Chris, he said, “First, this experiment is dumb. Second, let’s focus on air since I can move things with my mind.”
“Like Maisy?”
He laughed out loud, air whistling past his thin lips. “I wish. My ability isn’t nearly as strong as hers, but it’s still pretty kick ass.”
I held out my hands. Before he touched me, he said, “You’re not going to explode me or anything, are you?”
“I hope not.”
He cringed and jerked his hands back, but at the last second, said, “What the hell.”
He grabbed my hands. I didn’t bother warning him about them being hot because they weren’t. Not right now anyway. At the contact, I expected some kind of reaction like I’d felt with Hudson, but there was nothing but the feel of his clammy palms against mine.
“I don’t see anything,” Coach Tom said to the class, “which means you guys aren’t concentrating hard enough. Focus on the element. See it. Feel it. Breath it. Close your eyes, if you have to.” He paused. “In fact, that’s an order. Everyone close your eyes and think of your element.”
I did as he said, thinking of air. I inhaled deeply. It smelled like a mixture of scented lotions and man sweat. I could practically taste it on my tongue.
Wrinkling my nose, I opened my eyes only to meet Hudson’s piercing gaze from across the room. That intense look brought my flames roaring back to life in, completely obliterating any cold inside me.
“Ow!” Chris cried and jerked his hands away from me. “You burned me!”
He stared down at his hands. They were red as if he’d dunked them in a boiling pot of water.
“What the hell?” he snapped at me.
“I’m so sorry. I didn’t meant to.” I could feel my face turning as red as his palms.
Coach Tom hurried over and gently took hold of one of Chris’s hands. “That looks bad. You should get some ice on them right away. Go to the nurse’s office.” His gaze shifted to me. “If you’re going to cause something like this, then you need to help fix it. Go with him.”
“Yes, sir.” I followed Chris out of the room, staring at his back so I wouldn’t meet Hudson’s gaze again.
I�
��d always thought he was trouble, but the truth was we were dangerous together. And I had to know why.
Chapter 8
I accompanied Chris back to the main building. He mumbled the whole way, cursing my name and everything about me. Normally I would’ve said something to shut him up, but I couldn’t stop thinking about Hudson and what it all meant. I wish I could talk to someone about it, but it would feel awkward with my new friends. They would give me a hard time because Hudson was part of the Red Letters. If I had been a normal girl in a normal family, I’d talk to my mother.
The thought of her sent a wave of grief crashing through my wall of hatred for her. It did that sometimes. Broke through my anger and summoned all the memories of the woman she was before the media filleted open her life, revealing shadows and monsters I never knew existed. The evil she’d been hiding from me and my dad, probably for years, had been put on display for the whole world.
“Hey! Psycho,” Chris snapped. “Can you get the door for me? Can’t really do it with blisters on my hands, now can I?”
“Again, I’m really sorry.” I opened the door and let him pass.
“Sure you are. You probably revel in hurting people, just like your mother.” He walked in front of me.
My fist flew at the back of his head, but I deliberately missed by a few inches.
“I felt that,” he said.
“Good.”
I didn’t know where the nurse’s office was, but he seemed to. So I continued following him until we were almost to the front of the building. Chris stopped at a door and lightly kicked it a few times instead of waiting for me to knock.
It opened and a woman with long dark hair and a narrow face looked from me to Chris. “Everything okay?”
“No. It’s not.” Chris held up his blistered hands in front of her face. “Look what this fire-breather did to me!”
“Those look terrible!” She glared at me. “You did this?”
“It was an accident,” I mumbled.
The nurse didn’t hear me. She ushered us in and had Chris sit down on a narrow hospital bed in the corner. “This is going to take a while to heal. You’re going to miss next period.”
He rolled his eyes. “Just great. I was supposed to give my report. I’ve been waiting all week to do it.”
“You could still do it and come back after,” the nurse suggested.
He held up his hands dramatically. “With this? I’m dying here!”
“What’s going on?”
All heads swiveled to the open doorway. Linda stood in the entrance, her hands clasped together. Her hair had been pulled up into a lazy bun, with long tendrils of hair finding their way past her smooth complexion.
“It seems the new girl burned Chris,” the nurse said.
“It was an accident,” I repeated.
Linda glanced from me to the nurse. “You seem to have everything under control, Jane. Rose, why don’t you come with me for a minute?”
I gladly left the small room that smelled like antiseptic and moth balls and followed Linda back to her office.
Chris called after us, “I hope you expel her!”
When we reached Linda’s office, she said, “Close the door behind you.”
I swallowed the jagged rocks in my throat and did as she asked. Maybe I would get expelled. I would’ve welcomed it weeks ago, but things were actually going pretty good. I had friends, and then the whole thing with Hudson. It wasn’t a relationship. I’d never delude myself into thinking Hudson would ever date a girl like me, but there was something there. Something about our powers that drew us together.
“Have a seat.” Linda circled her desk and sat down.
“I really am sorry about what happened,” I said as I lowered into an old leather chair. Its wooden legs groaned in protest. “I didn’t mean to hurt him.”
“Why don’t you just tell me what happened?”
There wasn’t much to tell, especially if I was leaving out the part about Hudson, which I most certainly did. I told her how I was nervous and felt myself heat up. I couldn’t control it, and Chris had touched me at the peak of the sensation.
She nodded thoughtfully and scribbled something into a file. Had she already had my file open on her desk?
“Are you going to expel me?”
She set the pen down. “For an accident? We’ve had far worse happen.” She closed my file. “You are not in trouble, Rose, but I am going to change your fifth period. Learning to control your volatile power simply can’t happen in a large class, both for your safety and the other students’.”
I cringed at sharp words, were but there was no malice on her face. She was right, of course, and I hated that about myself.
“What I’d like to do instead is tutor you myself. I think you’d benefit from one-on-one training, especially from someone who knew your mother best. She had a special relationship with her gift.”
My heart skipped several beats in excitement. This wasn’t the response I’d expected. “You’d do that?”
“Of course. It would be my honor, and I think it’s what Aurora would want, too.”
Was it? And if it was, would she want me to use my powers for evil like she had? I squirmed in my seat, thinking how she lay below me in a deep sleep.
“What’s wrong?”
My hands twisted in and out of each other. “No one told me my mother was here.”
“Your father didn’t?” The shock in her voice was unmistakable.
I shook my head.
“I’m so sorry. I would’ve told you, but I thought you knew.”
“I still don’t get why they brought her here, of all places. A school.”
She thought about this and leaned back in her chair. “There was much debate about where to put her when she was finally knocked to sleep, but it came down to a couple of things. First, our security rivals that of the ISA’s building in Washington.”
“Really?” As far as I could tell, this place didn’t look well protected other than an iron gate and some security cameras. It was far less secure than any of my other schools I’d been to.
As if reading my mind, she said, “Most of the security is done by way of magic. We have all kinds of spells protecting this school.”
That made sense, I guess. “And what’s the other thing?”
“The ISA wanted us to wake up Aurora, and believe me, we tried, especially in the first few years. We attempted everything we could think of, but the spell is unbreakable. Mr. Stenberg, however, still goes to her weekly to attempt it again.” She cocked her head to the side. “Does it bother you that she’s here?”
“A little.” The lie tasted bad on my tongue. “No, a lot. I hate her. She destroyed my life, and my father’s. I can’t go anywhere without someone calling me a terrible name. I will never have a normal life because of her.”
She stared back at me for what felt like a very long time, and the air grew thick with tension. She leaned forward and rested her elbows on her desk. “I’d like to tell you something I’ve been working on, but you must keep it a secret. Can you do that?”
I nodded and forced myself to breathe deeply. The fire inside me stirred, anxious to spread its limbs within me.
“Your mother was an amazing woman, and as her long-time best friend, I knew better than anyone what she was capable of.” She paused. “She was not capable of murder.”
I stilled, and my toes grew numb. “What are you saying?”
“I’m saying I don’t think she did what everyone has accused her of doing.”
Shock rocked through me, making my bones ache. “But they have it on film! It shows her burning alive fifty-two people with the Foundation standing behind her, the worst terrorist organization this world has ever seen.”
She linked her fingers together. “So the news says, but maybe you should try talking to the people who knew her best. Your mother was no murderer. She was tricked into doing it, possibly even controlled.”
“By who? The Foundation?”
Her brows furrowed, and she took a moment to answer. “Possibly, but part of me thinks even they were manipulated.”
“Where did the other Foundation members go after my mother was captured?” That was one piece of news that had not been televised—the others who had been involved. They weren’t newsworthy compared to what my mother had done.
“The Enforcers hunted down many and executed them. Others went into hiding.”
Death would’ve been my mother’s fate too, had she not been put to sleep. But sleep wasn’t the only effect of the magic cast upon her. The spell had been infused with protection too, much to the dismay of both the US government and the ISA. My mother couldn’t be killed while she was in her sleep state. God knows, people had tried. She had been about impossible to kill while she was alive, hence a sleeping spell was cast, but no one foresaw that it would also protect her. I suspected Mr. Stenberg had something to do with it, especially since he was the one who created the spell. Then it was Becca’s parents who performed it. I’d heard rumors it was an impressive spell, the likes no one would ever see again.
I rubbed my palm against my chest. The idea that my mother could’ve been innocent made emotions careen out of control inside me, like a pinball stuck in a machine with all kinds of swinging arms and electric forces to bounce it from one end to another. It was too much.
Linda pursed her lips, her eyes sad. “This must be quite a shock to hear after everything you’ve been through. I only tell you this because it makes me sad to see Aurora’s daughter hate her so much. She was a beautiful person. One day, when you’re ready, I’d love to share some stories about her with you.”
I wanted to say I’d like that, but I don’t know if I did. The image of my mother had already been painted in my mind as someone who was selfish, cruel, power-hungry. Could a painting be erased?
Linda tapped the table lightly and smiled. “Enough talk of the past. On Monday, I want you to meet me in my office fifth period, and we’ll begin training.”
“Thank you,” I whispered, but anxiety’s cold fingers had gripped my stomach and was squeezing tight. I feared working with my mother’s best friend would send me down a water slide that would destroy everything I believed.